Mumbai police’s logic distancing

Mumbai police’s logic distancing

The ‘guideline’ issued by Mumbai Police on Sunday to restrict Mumbai residents within a 2 km radius, unless they are out for ‘essentials’ or to work, is the brainchild of a ‘police state’. Or, perhaps more aptly, of Keystone Cops, those clumsy, not-very-organised fictional policemen from the silent film era. The police action — almost 7,000 vehicles of people crossing their 2 km lakshman rekha were impounded on Sunday itself — could have been made keeping the best intentions in mind: limit Covid-19 contagion, protect the citizenry from itself. But the restriction ignores the real potential of misuse by beat policemen, is arbitrary and makes no logical sense. Neither does the extension of lockdown in Maharashtra to July 31.

If the mandated necessary precautions — wearing masks, abiding by social distancing norms, working from home when possible — are in place, the 2 km directive serves little purpose other than to create the optics that the police are ‘on the job’. This, at the cost of citizens, even those who strictly maintain Covid-19 mitigation norms. This ‘micro-lockdowns’ in Mumbai throw the very purpose of having containment zones to the wind. Instead of ensuring that life in the ‘new normal’ negotiates responsibly with the pandemic, the police directive foists upon people an unnecessary ‘abnormality’. How a person travelling 1.5 km out of her home is less of a risk to the populace than someone travelling 2 km borders on the superstitious.

The police have a role in ensuring citizens wear masks, maintain social distancing, etc. But to impose arbitrary restrictions — as if each coronavirus’ theatre of action is restricted to a 2 km zone, after which it skids to a stop — is silly, and oppressive. As is the lockdown extension by the ‘random’ period of a month.